


Make Me Mean (To Fight for You)

by Wayward_WLW (Parker_Haven_Wuornos)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe John Dies instead of Mary, BAMF Mary Winchester, Baby Sam Winchester, But it's just john winchester, Character Death, Child Dean Winchester, Gen, Mary Winchester Lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-05
Updated: 2021-02-05
Packaged: 2021-03-16 19:55:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29213040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Parker_Haven_Wuornos/pseuds/Wayward_WLW
Summary: “This is insane,” She mutters, and almost closes the trunk, almost leaves it all behind.But her father’s voice is still in her head. Monsters don’t give up.That thing had come for her family. It had said it had plans. It had killed John and brought him back, only to kill him again, this time for good.It will come for Sammy.
Relationships: John Winchester/Mary Winchester (mentioned)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	Make Me Mean (To Fight for You)

**Author's Note:**

> Random AU I came up with while rewatching the pilot. If this is something you're interested in, please let me know because I definitely have ideas for how to expand the AU into canon era. Thanks for reading!

**November 2 nd, 1983**

Mary Winchester wakes up to the crackling of the baby monitor and the sound of Sam fussing. She rolls over and pokes John. The night before, Sam had been awake every twenty minutes, and every time she had gotten up, she had soothed him, she had returned him to his crib, only to be up again the next time she heard him.

Maybe, distantly, she thought it was John’s turn, but she was too tired for fully formed thoughts; she just wanted a decent night’s sleep, and Sam was John’s son too. She rolls over to go back to sleep. Sam just needs to be held for a minute, rocked and whispered to until he settles; John can handle it.

She jolts fully awake a moment later, not entirely sure why. These days she can’t tell what are her old instincts letting her know something is wrong, and what’s the residue from the years of paranoia and fear when she was hunting.

She gets out of bed, grumbling to herself about how ridiculous she was being, but the instinct tugs again, despite herself, she starts to move faster.

It doesn’t matter. By the time she gets there, it’s too late.

The demon smiles at her, his eyes reflecting unnaturally in the faint light that filters in from the streetlamps outside. “Good to see you again,” He says, and then he vanishes and she sprints for Sam’s crib, hating that she was too slow, too out of practice, to kill that thing right then.

For a moment, she forgets John, too fixed on checking on Sam. He looks fine. His eyes are wide, and when she leans over his crib he smiles, squirming and reaching for her. She lets out a breath. Sam is okay. Sam is safe.

And then a drop of blood falls onto his forehead.

She looks up and her scream chokes off and dies in her throat.

John is stuck to the ceiling, blood dropping, thick and slow, from a wound in his stomach. His eyes are open, but she can see that they’re empty.

She’s too late.

She has time to think that she should have checked the date, that she should have paid more attention. She should have been ready.

And then John bursts into flames, and she really does scream. For several moments everything is heat and fear and confusion and a grief so big she can’t keep track of it, but even if Mary’s mind doesn’t remember everything she used to be, her body does. She grabs Sam, lifting him out of the crib and heading for the door, her stupid, impractical nightgown—a sign of complacency she’d never thought she’d achieve—tangling around her legs.

Dean is out of bed, his eyes are enormous in his face, and his lips are just starting to form words—a fearful question, maybe a scream—but she pushes Sam towards him.

“Take your brother outside as fast as you can!”

Dean has probably never heard her shout before, at least not at him, but he still does exactly as she asks, holding onto Sam in arms that are too small for his task and running for the stairs.

Mary goes back to the nursery, even as the flames are curling down the walls, filling the room with smoke and the acrid scent of sulfur.

“John!” She knows he’s dead, but there’s a part of her, the part that had been fighting for normal for so many years, that is begging all of this to be a nightmare, or at least something she can recover from, that wants to believe he isn’t, not yet.

John’s body drops to the flood, heavy and loud, and she screams again, her lungs filling with smoke until she can’t breathe. Her eyes burn, and she turns.

There’s no saving John. Her boys need her.

She runs out of the house and is barely three steps onto the cold, dew-wet grass when the nursery windows explode outwards.

Sirens wail, the fire roars behind her, taking the house too fast. Sam is crying.

The thing that makes her cry is hearing Dean try to comfort him.

* * *

Nearly two hours later, the police are interviewing her, asking questions that make her wonder if they think she accidentally murdered her husband while trying to commit insurance fraud. Maybe they think she did it on purpose.

Either way, she mostly tunes them out, answering by rote between coughs as she watches firefighters come in and out what’s left of her front door.

One of them approaches the cop that’s interviewing her and whispers something in his ear.

“Ma’am,” He says, “Looks like it was some kind of electrical issue; have you had any problems with the wiring before?”

Mary sighs, glancing back at the ambulance where Dean is still holding Sam and glaring as viciously as a four-year-old is capable at anyone who tries to take him from him. “The lights were flickering tonight,” She says truthfully.

Of course, she knew that was a sign of demonic activity, rather than faulty wiring, but she won’t tell that to these civilians. They would only think she’d lost her mind.

_Mad with grief,_ they would say, because a woman who loses her husband cannot hold herself up, she has to die of a broken heart as soon as she’s alone.

But they don’t know what’s out there, not like she does.

Eventually, Kate steps out of the crowd of neighbors and grabs Mary’s elbow. “Come stay with us tonight.”

When the cop tries to protest, Kate levels him with her ‘I’m a third grade teacher and you _will_ be forced to stand in the corner alone for thirty minutes if you argue with me’ glare. It almost makes Mary smile, and she goes with her willingly, glad to turn away from the smoldering remains of her normal, safe life.

She takes Sam from Dean and grips his damp little palm in hers as they cross the street to Kate’s house.

Mike is waiting, and he reaches for Sam as she goes by, but she bares her teeth, an instinctive snarl—a sound she’s fairly sure she’s never made before—escapes her.

He quickly withdraws his hands. Mary attempts an apologetic expression, but can’t find the energy for it, and she catches Kate glaring at Mike when they think she’s not looking.

Mike Junior is seven, far too old to still need a crib, but Mike drags an old pack and play out of the basement so Sam will have somewhere to sleep.

Dean curls up next to Mary in their guest bedroom, where the sheets smell like artificial lavender, a scent that always made Mary itchy.

“Mommy?” Dean says very quietly, his voice still rounded and unsure. “Where’s daddy?”

Mary knows she’s a coward, but she doesn’t know how to explain death to a four-year-old, and she definitely can’t do it on so little sleep. “It’s okay baby,” She says instead. “Just get some sleep.”

She strokes his hair, pretending that it’s to soothe _him_ , and waits for sleep to claim her.

She can see the first rays of sunrise before it finally does.

* * *

They won’t let her back into her house the next day, and Mary is pissed. She’s grieving and she’s exhausted and this fucking cop is in her face, so she shouts at him, kicking up a fuss like she never has before, demanding to be let in.

Eventually, Kate shows up and leads her away, just as tears start to fall. She knows she should be crying more, she knows she should be letting herself feel all of this, but already her life in Lawrence is starting to feel like a dream. Kate and Mike—some of their first friends when they moved to the neighborhood—feel like strangers.

Mary wonders if maybe she’s the stranger, the unfamiliar, unnatural thing in this picture-perfect life.

“Mary,” Kate says carefully. “I uh… how are you doing?”

It’s a stupid question, but Mary can’t really blame her for it. What is she supposed to say? _I’m sorry your husband is dead and your house is ashes; do you want some cookies?_

So she says what she thinks she’s supposed to say. “I’m as fine as I can be.”

“The boys need you, Mary,” Kate reminds her.

She nods. She knows that.

Sam and Dean are playing in the living room, and she watches them, sees how Sam is sitting up, occasionally toppling over until Dean nudges him back upright.

She leaves Kate to sit next to them. Dean looks at her, his eyes so solemn it brings the tears back to her eyes.

“Daddy isn’t coming back,” He tells her, oddly matter of fact.

Mary swallows a sob, failing halfway through so it turns into a broken cough. “Dean, honey…”

But he just keeps looking at her, unblinking. “What happened to the angels, mommy?”

She frowns, and in her distraction, a tear manages to slip down her cheek.

“You said angels were watching over us. Where were they?”

She has no good answer for him, and the effort of holding in her tears is turning into physical pain. She can’t tell her son that angels, if they exist at all—and she is not above thinking that they do exist; she’d rather believe in everything than be surprised down the line—they probably aren’t any more helpful than demons.

How quickly her faith had burned up in the face of all this.

She looks at Sam, letting her eyes linger. The demon had been in his room. He’d been standing over Sam’s crib, and he’d left when she got there. What had he done? What had he done to her son?

But Sammy gargles happily, reaching for Mary until she picks him up and sits him in her lap. He tugs on the ends of her hair, stubbornly trying to put it in his mouth even as Dean reaches up and tries to take it away.

He seems like a perfectly normal baby. They both seem perfectly normal.

But their lives have been touched by a demon, and Mary knows too much about those. The yellow-eyed demon came for Sam, and she isn’t an optimist; her father had taught her not to be when it came to the things they hunted.

It would come back for him, to finish whatever it started, and she knows she can’t let it.

“Can you keep an eye on them?” She asks Kate, who has been watching out of the corner of her eye from the kitchen. “I need to take a walk.”

Kate nods. “Take whatever time you need.”

When she leaves, Mary has to step over the pile of casseroles people have left on the porch. It’s what normal neighbors do when something bad happens. Distantly, she’s grateful, but the part of her that was one of those neighbors, a part of this community, feels shriveled and false.

_You’re not like them, Mary,_ Her father used to say. _You’re a warrior_.

She doesn’t feel like a warrior now. She feels like someone who just lost everything, has barely slept, and doesn’t remember the last time she ate. She feels like hard-boiled shit.

Still, she has work to do. She goes into the house through a basement window, and then digs around their old stuff until she finds the trunk she’d stored here the first night they’d moved in. It’s still padlocked shut, coated in dust, which she wipes off with a rag she grabs off of a nearby shelf. Carefully, she spins the lock, the combination coming back to her even though it’s been over a year since she opened it.

Her leather jacket is still folded neatly at the top. It’s a bit cracked and faded, but not as bad as it could have been, thanks to the nights when Dean had been colicky and she’d brought it out, bouncing him on her lap with one arm and using the other to carefully oil the leather.

She shrugs it on and feels different, almost better. Underneath are books, just the essentials, nothing like the library her mother had tended to. A sawed-off shotgun is nestled carefully between the books, and underneath that, her favorite revolver, a hunting knife, her mother’s silver blade, and a hatchet.

She takes the knife and the revolver, then balks when she realizes she’ll have to hide them in the clothes she borrowed from Kate.

“This is insane,” She mutters, and almost closes the trunk, almost leaves it behind.

_I can get a job,_ She thinks. _Find an apartment. We’ll have enough to get by for a while with the insurance money. I can move on from this._

But her father’s voice is still in her head. _Monsters don’t give up._

That thing had come for her family. It had said it had plans. It had killed John and brought him back, only to kill him again, this time for good.

_It will come for Sammy._ She knows this, deep in her bones, as sure as she knows that salt hurts ghosts and vampires die when you cut off their heads. The demon will come for Sammy and the only way to protect him, the only way to ensure that he and Dean will be able to grow up normal and safe, is to kill it first.

Standing up, she pulls the jacket on. It fits just as well as it used to, and it’s easy to hide the revolver in the pocket she’d sewn in for just this purpose. The knife is easily concealed in the waistband of her jeans.

She goes back to Kate’s house, and when she crouches down next to her boys, she swears Dean reaches for the knife, even though there’s no way he could know it’s there.

“Mary,” Mike says seriously. “We need to talk.”

“Talk?” She says.

“About John.”

“What about him?” _John’s dead,_ She wants to say. _John was killed by a demon, and the only thing I have left is protecting my sons._

“A funeral?” Mike prompts. “Maybe an obituary for the papers?”

“No obituary,” She snaps. An obit like that would send up a red flag to every hunter in a hundred-mile radius, and she wants to keep this close. This is her fight. 

Mike flinches. “What about a funeral? People will be expecting—”

“There’s nothing to bury,” She says, her voice cold and foreign to her own ears. “That’s what the police said.”

“Right, but um, some people bury a coffin for, um, closure.”

“Right. Closure.”

There won’t be closure until she knows the boys are safe. She can rest, she can cry, when her sons aren’t going to be hunted by a demon for the rest of their lives because of a stupid choice she made.

“Listen, Mary,” Mike says, “You aren’t… you’re not normal right now.”

“My husband died last night,” She says, still in that steady, distant tone. “He died and my house burned to the ground. What the _fuck_ would normal look like.”

Mike flinches again at the swear.

“Have a funeral if you want, I need to go check on my boys.”

As she leaves, she sees Mike and Kate exchange a glance.

No hunter she knew would have blinked an eye at her response, but she sees the way the veneer of normalcy she’d painted onto herself was flaking off. Already they are wondering about her, already they are beginning to fear her.

The demon had touched her life too, just like the boys, and she had become an unnatural thing that didn’t belong in their world. Maybe she always had been.

She takes the boys and checks into a motel. It reminds her of her youth, a seedy sort of place where she would have holed up with one of her cousins or her parents during a hunt, the exact kind of place John would have assumed she’d never set foot.

It’s funny, looking back at the blurry newsreel of their relationship; there was so much he didn’t know about her, so many things she hadn’t told him. There had been many times where she’d thought about it. The nights where she’d woken up from dreams about her parents’ deaths and those horrible yellow eyes, and he’d begged her to tell him what was wrong. She’d almost let the whole story spill out, from hunting with her parents, to going solo at seventeen, to her quest to give it all up, and the fact that he’d enabled her to.

But she never had. She thinks he might have believed her, but then what would they have done. He’d have wanted to see something, she’d have taken him on a hunt, and then…

And then she’d have brought him into everything, just like her father had brought her mother—once an ordinary librarian working in an admittedly haunted library—into the life. Would John have agreed that they needed to stay away from it? Would John have wanted to be normal like her? Or would he have become addicted to the heroics like her father and all the other hunters she’d known? 

There’s no way of knowing. She’d never told him and regrets are a waste of time.

John’s car, the impractical but undeniably stylish Impala, is sitting outside the motel room. Logic tells her she should sell it, get something safe for the kids or big and durable, but perhaps all of her remaining sentimentalism has gone to this one thing, because she can’t bring herself to think of it for more than a few minutes. Instead, once Sam and Dean are settled and she has placed careful devil’s traps at every possible entrance, she goes back to the house, back to her old trunk, and hauls it upstairs and out to the car.

The trunk is big enough for all of the gear she’d kept as a precaution, with room to spare with everything she’ll need now that she’s going back to the life.

The thought pauses her. Going back into the life. She’d thought she’d gotten out. She’d believed she was free. Sam, Dean, John, her house, the oven she couldn’t cook with and the yard where she failed to grow flowers. Her life.

But the jacket on her shoulders and the revolver in her pocket feel more real than any of that ever did.

The smell of smoke lingers in the air, hovering around her even though the fire is long extinguished.

“Mary?”

She looks up and slams the trunk closed before Mike can get close enough to see what’s inside.

“Hi,” She says, knowing even as it comes out that there’s no way to make this situation seem normal, and he hasn’t even seen the weapons or the book titled _Bestiary Americana_.

“Packing up?” He asks, a note of suspicion in his voice, hidden under friendly cheer.

She rests her hand on her hip, that much closer to the knife tucked into her waistband. “The police wouldn’t let me into my house earlier so I came back to get what I could out of the basement.”

His face softens a little. “Did much make it?”

“No,” She says truthfully. “We didn’t keep many things down there.”

Mike makes a sympathetic sound at the back of his throat, then goes on. “So where are the boys?”

“With a friend,” Mary says coolly. Her fingers twitch closer to the knife as she begins to wonder if Mike is a demon.

“Oh. Who?”

“Excuse me?” She wonders why he’s asking, wonders if he suspects she left them alone in a motel room when they’re both far, far too young for that. He isn’t wrong but she’s still a little offended that he thinks she’s capable of that.

She’d thought she’d had them fooled for the past few years, thought they all believed she was just a wife and mother, not perfect at either but close enough. Part of her, the part of her who was once a teenager desperate to escape hunting and monsters and life on an endless road, still wants them to believe she’s that.

But most of her thinks she was cleansed in fire, and that woman is gone, leaving only the hunter.

“I just wanted to check in about the boys,” Mike says, backing down. Not a demon, then. “We called some people and couldn’t figure out where you were staying.”

“I left them with a friend for a couple hours,” Mary says. “We’re staying in a hotel until my brother can come pick me up.”

“Oh, that’s good,” Mike says, forcing a plastic smile. “Spending time with family is good.”

“Yeah.”

She doesn’t mention that she hasn’t called her brother yet, that her brother hasn’t entirely forgiven her for what happened to their parents—which she hadn’t fully explained—and that he will probably have some snide remark about John getting killed which will only make her angry.

She isn’t even sure she’ll call him at all.

There’s an awkward pause with Mike, until finally he wishes her a good night and she climbs into the car and leaves.

She checks out of the motel before the sun comes up, strapping both boys carefully into car seats and angling the rearview mirror so she can see them.

She drives outside of town to an old, familiar stretch of road. She drives until she reaches a crossroads and parks the car, glancing back at Sam and Dean.

Dean is watching her. He looks old, too old. People had always said he had her eyes, and now she sees that he does. Dean has hunter’s eyes.

Heavy with grief for the boy he would have gotten to be, Mary reaches back and squeezes his foot. “Mommy will be right back. Keep an eye on your brother.”

He nods once, very seriously, as if he’s taking the order to heart.

It’s cold outside the car; winter is just beginning to sink its jaws into Kansas, but she won’t be here to see it, she just has one thing to do before she goes.

She stands in the center of the road, breathing in the night, one hand on her knife the other on her revolver.

“Listen up, motherfucker,” She hisses into the dark. “If you can hear me, know this. I’m coming for you. No matter where you run or what dank cave you hide in, I’m going to find you. You won’t lay a hand on my boys, you won’t hurt my family, not ever again.”

She isn’t sure if she’s imagining the quiet laugh in the wind that rustles across the dirt road.


End file.
